Religous arguments II

It occurs to me, after reading the comment made to the preceding blog, that part of the problem with the science vs. religion argument is the usual boundary issue: whose domain rules should be used to evaluate the issue?

Members of the religious domain want to use their rules and standards to evaluate the validity of the scientific domain; members of the scientific domain assert that their domain rules should be used to evaluate the religious domain. From the standpoint of each domain, the other domain is sorely lacking. In fact, we all tend to judge the domains of others by our own domain standards. They do the same to us. The issue that arises over and over again throughout human history is how to deal with domains whose rules and behaviors are abhorrent to us.

I'm certainly not saying that we have to evaluate each domain from within its own rule structure. It would be impossible to have law and government if each group could only be judged by its own rules. The problem is how to establish the validity of an over-arching set of domain rules. Governments do that by simple establishment of an entire nation as a domain with its own rules, or "laws", and further asserting that such laws have priority over the rules of all domains under them or subordinate to them.

In order to evaluate government domains and their rule systems, we then have to establish some further system that includes all the government domains within a new rule system that is asserted to have priority over all subordinate domains, such as governments. Few governments are willing to surrender their own rule systems to such a system (like the UN or the League of Nations). But without subordinating their own rules, they cannot be in a position to judge the appropriateness or acceptability of the rules of other governmental/national domains. So they dance back and forth across the boundary, trying to assert their right to judge without surrendering to the judgment of others. An interesting if insoluble problem.